Most Americans take for granted opportunities they have – regarding living arrangements, employment situations, means of transportation, social and recreational activities, and other aspects of everyday life.

For many Americans with disabilities, however, barriers in their communities take away or severely limit their choices. These barriers may be obvious, such as lack of ramped entrances for people who use wheelchairs, lack of interpreters or captioning for people with hearing impairments, lack of Braille or taped copies of printed materials for people who have visual impairments. Other barriers – frequently less obvious – can be even more limiting to efforts on the part of people with disabilities to live independently, and they result from people’s misunderstanding and prejudices about disability. These barriers result in low expectations about things people with disabilities can achieve.

So, people with disabilities not only have to deal with the effects of their disabling conditions, but they also have to deal with both kinds of barriers. Otherwise, they are likely to be limited to a life of dependency and low personal satisfaction. (The National Organization on Disabilities has surveyed the status of Americans with disabilities for 18 years. The latest survey can be accessed at http://www.nod.org/).

This need not occur. Millions of people all over America who experience disabilities have established lives of independence. They fulfill all kinds of roles in their communities, from employers and employee to marriage partners to parents to students to athletes to politicians to taxpayers – an unlimited list. In most cases, the barriers facing them haven’t been removed, but these individuals have been successful in overcoming or at least dealing with them.

So, what is independent living? Essentially, it is living like everyone else – having opportunities to make decisions that affect one’s life, able to purchase or attend activities of one’s own choosing – limited only in the same way that one’s non-disabled neighbors are limed.